Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

by Judson Brewer MD PhD

So simple that we need only three elements in situations like this to learn: an environmental cue, a behavior, and a result. In this case, walking up to a busy street (the environmental cue) is our signal to look both ways before crossing (the behavior). Crossing the street uninjured (the result) teaches us to remember to repeat the action again in the future.

Anxiety is born when our PFCs don’t have enough information to accurately predict the future.

you need to learn how to safely discharge the excess energy associated with that “I almost died” adrenaline surge, so that it doesn’t lead to chronic or post-traumatic stress and anxiety. Simply talking to someone doesn’t count here; you may really have to do something physical, like shout, shake, dance, or engage in some type of physical exercise.

Like a seed needing fertile soil, the old survival brain creates the conditions for anxiety to sprout in your thinking brain (chronic). This is where anxiety is born. Fear + uncertainty = anxiety.

To hack our brains and break the anxiety cycle, we must become aware of two things: that we are getting anxious and/or panicking and what results from anxiety/panicking.

That’s because unexpected rewards fire off dopamine in your brain at a much higher rate than expected ones.

So how do we update reward values and break worry, procrastination, and other bad habits? One simple thing: awareness. We need to give our brains new information to establish that the value they had learned in the past is now outdated.

growth-mindset individuals don’t mind or fear failure as much because they realize their performance can be improved; indeed, learning comes from failure.

In her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dweck advises, “If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, seek new strategies, enjoy effort, and keep on learning.

Children are born scientists. . . . They do everything scientists do. They test how strong things are, they measure the falling bodies, they’re balancing themselves, they’re doing all kinds of things to learn the physics of the world around them, so they are all perfect scientists. They ask questions, they drive parents crazy with why, why, why?

The high alert habit mode could be seen for what it was: sensations associated with danger. In the absence of danger, by simply getting curious about what those sensations felt like, Dave could see for himself that these sensations not only were inaccurate (signaling danger when there was none) but would fade on their own.

Below is a card-sized version of the RAIN practice that you can photocopy or take a picture of with your phone, so you can carry it with you for easy reference. RAIN Recognize what is happening right now. Allow/Accept it: Don’t push it away or try to change it. Investigate body sensations, emotions, thoughts: Ask, “Hmm, what is going on in my body right now?” Note what is happening in your experience.

The next time you are frustrated or anxious, try this. Stop and simply name the emotion (e.g., “Oh, that’s X emotion”). Check to see how narrow or wide your eyes are. Open your eyes wide (and perhaps add in a hmm) as a way to jump-start your curiosity. Keep them wide for ten seconds and notice what happens to the anxiety (or whatever difficult emotion you’ve just identified). Does it get stronger or weaker? Does it change in character, or shift in some other way?